Hillary vows to go on
Despite almost unanimous acceptance that the race is over in the media, Hillary Clinton today announced that she intends to remain in the presidential race “until there’s a nominee.”
It is difficult to understand why - although she is perhaps banking on a rebound from almost certain victory in the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky - she is (for now) claiming that she will soldier on despite every possible argument for not doing so, including the inclusion of non-contests in Michigan and Florida, now being lost.
Hello Hillary, the race is over!
Continuing the contest, despite news that last month her campaign was only perpetuated by loaning herself $6.4 million, can only cause harm to the Democratic Party she claims to love. As other Democrats despair, superdelegates again trickled toward Obama today - a trickle which surely must soon become a flood if they are to end unnecessary division.
Having fought a campaign mirroring the worst of the Republican tactics which Obama last night said we should move beyond, the Clinton campaign has few friends, no argument, and diminishing support. She perhaps hopes to claim that the nomination was ’stolen’ from her by the very superdelegates she was relying on to overturn the choice of voters, but in her heart she knows (being a consummate politician) that the race is over.
The superdelegates now need to reinforce last night’s message - that Obama is going to fight McCain - to avoid a needless distraction of a horse race between a thoroughbred and a lame filly. If they can do so without pulling out the pistol, all the better. If not, there are many who will happily supply the bullet.
In many Democrat minds, the contest in November was always going to be best defined by the candidate who had the judgement to oppose the Iraq War from the start, but Obama’s surprising appeal and his ability to raise massive fortunes from over 1.5 million individual donors has also not gone unnoticed. A message of ‘the future not the past’, fought between a 72 year old Republican and a young Senator barely tarnished by Washington politics-as-normal, will also help in a year where voters are already demonstrating a desire for change.
The future is tall, black, and dynamic. It is not old, muddled, and tarnished.